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Goals of the Manifesto
This section originally appeared as part of Why this book? in the Manifesto v0.8. The other sections of that chapter appear below: * The Shake-up * The Age of the Spirit * New Spiritual Leadership * New Reformation * Sacrificing the Church's Idols * Disciples Answering the Call * Expect Conflict * The Red Pill or the Blue Pill? * Summary of Why this Book? * Goals of the Manifesto * An emerging Apostolic Picture My goals with this book are fourfold 1. TWAWKIIO. The-world-as-we-know-it-is-over. Leaving a modern information age and lately a post-modern imagination era behind, we have already entered what I call the Age of the Spirit. As the context has dramatically altered, this will require an entirely different rule set, should the church wish to move up from being the tail to again being the head and score goals. The political, economic, and cultural changes today are clearly setting the stage for the last leg of history. As we learn to understand the new rule set, we will not only be able to navigate the times ahead, but prophetically challenge and change at least half of the soon eight billion people on this planet to join in the greatest Jesus movement this world has ever seen. 2. CAWKI, church-as-we-know-it, goes backstage; CAGWI – church-as-God-wants-it - appears for the final act. Sure, organizational and traditional, Constantinean Christianity will never cease to exist; but, in this age, it will soon lose whatever credit is left if it continues simply to prolong religious tradition. If CAWKI does not change, it will remain a reactive ghetto, angry at a world it no longer understands, a pale caterer of ready-made Christian programs for passive Christian consumers, and will serve as little more than a religious insurance company for the unaware and uneducated in some fear of hell. It also will be seen as a place of immense busyness and growing frustration for those truly called to the world, not to the church, a burial ground to callings and giftings. What emerges, like a butterfly out of a caterpillar, though, is the missional Ecclesia, CAGWI, the Church that is designed for mission. It consists of the small and the large, (a) the organic, nameless house churches that form multiplying networks and finally city churches and regional, modern “Antiochs”; and (b) of the more public, governmental dimension, ekklesia as the parliament of God, a place from which to influence and transform every matrix of society in the spirit and authority of the Empire of God. In Houses That Change the World, I have elaborated on (a); this book focuses on (b). 3. If ever the prophetic and apostolic has been like a mirror reflecting the true intentions and ways of God, this mirror has been diabolically shattered into a thousand pieces and distributed around the globe. Searching out those shards, re-collecting and reassembling them will lead to a recapturing of the vital apostolic and prophetic dimension as a God-given and therefore non-threatening resource for the church – and will initiate a long overdue upgrade of a human version of ekklesia into God’s version. Throughout church history, there has always been a love-hate relationship between the church and the apostles and prophets, as there was between Israel and the apostles and prophets who God had sent to them (Luke 11:49). The eternal battle between self-absorbed, idolatrous complacency and healthy, missional challenge (let alone the unhealthy ones) has snapped the Christian ties of love again and again. This has resulted in the contemporary, ugly fragmentation of the Body of Christ into roughly 39,000 “protestant” denominations – plus 50,000+ agencies as well as countless religious mom-and-pop shops - outside the pseudo-apostolic Roman Catholic system. All of them, let’s face it, will never ever even agree to agree. And the only way forward may very well be the leaving of the CAWKI-Matrix altogether - and joining the formation of a global new wineskin, an entirely different species of ekklesia. This is exactly what I propose, and in this book, I will explain why I do. For this, we will have to cut through a jungle of hot and conflicting claims coming from larger-than-life personalities, guru-driven cults, and socalled apostolic networks that look strikingly like denominations of old and religious empires around uncrucified, religious, alpha males. But take heed: before the arrival of something genuine, let’s simply expect Satan, the great tumbler of things, to put out yet another smokescreen of the real – a fake, immature, upside-down version of what God is about to do – so that, when it comes, people might give a tired wave and look the other way. As easily as the Pharisees and Sadducees dismissed their own Messiah right before their very nose, people might miss out once again and fall into an exhausted slumber like the five proverbial virgins on low battery power after the religious excitement of the pseudo-apostolic fake fades away. Satan usually counts on an ample supply of people who naively are convinced they are ready before they are ready, the pre-desert Moses, pre-Tarsus Pauls of the day. This means that we will have to walk across a lot of burned ground together, and while our soles touch the smoldering remains of movements and groups that have proclaimed: “We are it!” only to crumble and fall apart before our eyes, another fading wave, we shall press on, driven both by the conviction that the real, authentic apostolic prophetic Christianity exists, and because we know our own hunger for it is real. And as we ask God for a fish, he won’t give us a snake. Discovering and engaging in the apostolic dimension of ekklesia will therefore lead to an immense upgrade of existence, liberation of long trapped potential, as we embrace the mind-boggling dimension of the cross. In this book, I also seriously want to attempt to win back the spent and nearly-lost trust the people of God have suffered at the hand of the proud claims of self-appointed Superapostles and prophetic enterprises scorching the land, and invite all of us to not throw out the baby with the bathwater, and keep hoping and looking for the true apostolic and prophetic people among us and go wild together and with God. 4. All this is leading towards a Reformation of Missions. Missions have been, for a long time, mostly an extra-church activity, centering on the sending out of persons from CAWKI, to reproduce, at best, inter-cultural and adapted forms of CAWKI in other areas and cultures, driven and mostly financed from a HQ on the other side of the planet. A missionary force of currently around 450,000 individual “missionaries” is doing good – but is it “doing God?” Are truly all of them sent by God? Given the amazing burnout rates, attrition, frustration, replication, duplication and plain repetition that so much characterizes modern missions for anyone who cares to take a behind-the-scene look, where the exceptions confirm the rule: how apostolic is what we today call Missions? The validity of one’s being sent in the New Testament is directly linked either to the direct promptings of the Spirit as in the case of Philip (Acts 8), or to biblical apostolic ministry – they are the ones who were sent, or they are the ones who send others. God has sent out many things in the past: the Bible speaks of the fact that he sent signs and wonders, prophets, his spirit, his son, his word, his angels. Jesus sent out The Twelve, later the Seventy Two, and, even later, apostolic teams like Paul and Barnabas; but how many of today’s missionaries are truly sent by God? Or just by a church, agency or, at worst, religious zealots or imperialists who, in usurping and assuming an apostolic role, function in bold replacement of God the sender? We would have to judge that by the fruit. And as we later take a closer look at “apostolic fruits,” I will leave this discernment to you. Fact is, that most of today’s “mission” activities happen unrelated to each other, outside any apostolic framework, a cohesive, legitimate, locally driven, apostolic strategy, and therefore the right hand does not know what the left is doing. The immense waste of time, lives, energy, and money, where everyone is frantically reinventing the wheel, forever on planes and in board meetings, out there finding yet another white spot on the map of the world to implement our angle, our program and drive the flag of our church or missions into foreign soil – violating one of the Pauline principles of never building on another man’s foundation - and hiring one more national or regional director for our Church X or our Mission Y, is simply not worth being called Christian, let alone apostolic. It’s a religious business whose hour has come to an end in sync with the great global fading of CAWKI. In spite (or because?) of all that talk of strategic partnership in Missions, an amazing wave of roundtable-ism and tales of synergy, most churches and missions still ignore some of the very core principles of apostolic mission. Often, this leads to nothing more than a reproduction of nonapostolic and non-prophetic forms of church and ministries, simply adding quantity, not quality, multiplying our own inherited religious DNA, an ecclesial and behavioral code, into other areas of the world. This, I contend, might actually prevent and slow down missions in the name of missions. However, as we move into an age of the apostolically and prophetically designed church, the DNA, the very sending base, the template of ekklesia itself changes completely, and therefore completely redefines missions. Missions is no longer a delegated activity for the local church misfits and enthusiasts, but becomes the very heartbeat, the DNA, the inbuilt ability and engine of Church-as-God-wants-it (hereinafter CAGWI). Missions then means to stop sending out missionaries, because the church is sending out itself, multiplying house churches, networks of house churches and whole regional “Antiochs” in a viral, epidemic fashion, carefully observing the apostolic principles of the Bible and moving under the prophetic guidance of the Holy Spirit. I believe this will increase the number of “missionaries” dramatically, and the church will start to behave like a starfish, that amazing sea animal that has regenerative and therefore reproductive abilities beyond our wildest imagination. Cut it almost any way you like, and it will grow back those cut off legs, while the severed leg itself will grow back into an entirely new starfish. The cut (read: persecution, opposition, threats, excommunications, crucifixions, and martyrdoms) actually does not damage, but speeds up the multiplication of the species. That is why this book concludes with the logical consequences of this reformation of mission.